The Gold of Thrace

by Aileen G. Baron

  “Ephesus,” Orman said, “the city of virgins.”

  They rode past the remains of the stadium, the Byzantine walls, Kosay shaking his head all the while.

  At the Selçuk road, he turned, drove up toward the Basilica of St. John, and stopped again.

  “The Temple of Artemis,” Kosay said, gesturing to a forlorn column standing in a shallow pool of water on their left. “One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the largest building in the Greek world.”

  Ducks in the pool sailed past the column and ruffled the surface of the water.

  “It was long and narrow, made of marble, surmounted by a pitched roof and pediment with three openings where Artemis would appear suddenly during the festival, awe inspiring and bloody, and lit by the evening sun.”

  The Mosque of Isa Bey and the ruins of the Basilica of St. John the Apostle loomed on the hill beyond the temple. Overhead, a stork soared, lit on top of the column of the Temple of Artemis, and fluttered her wings.

  “Ephesus had always been protected from harm by the gods,” Kosay said. “But after Constantine, after the black-robed priests came, nothing was the same. The city never recovered.”

  “The temple was destroyed by Goths,” Orman said.

  Kosay pointed a reproachful finger at him. “But never rebuilt. The harbor silted up, earthquakes and fires destroyed much of the grandeur of the city. The Artemesion was deserted. The library of Celsus burnt and stood on the main street of the city as an abandoned shell. The houses on the hill turned into a slum. The magnificent villas were divided and subdivided into tiny hovels with little light and air, the frescoes painted over or broken by partition walls.”

  Once again, he looked accusingly at Tamar and she shriveled.

  “And now we have only ruins,” he said.

  They had reached the museum by now. He rushed them through the first room filled with findings from the houses: table legs and toys, statuettes and busts, fresco fragments and gods.

  Tamar paused, agape at a statue of a male with grotesquely enlarged genitals.

  “Priapos,” Orman told her. “He was the god of fertility. He stood out in the vineyards like a scarecrow to protect the vines.”

  “He looks like a disease,” Tamar said.

  “But he sure scared the crows.”

  Kosay said, “According to Plutarch, the Ephesians worshipped fecundity,” and hustled them through the next hall, filled with gods and carvings from the many fountains of Ephesus. Mustafa lingered behind.

  They entered a hall displaying small finds: coins and jewelry, portrait heads and panels.

  “The Kybele was stolen from a case in this room,” Kosay said.

  “Not from the excavation?” Orman asked.

  “It was on loan.”

  “From which site?”

  “From a private collector. Anonymous.”

  “It was insured?”

  “That’s not the point,” Kosay said. “I am responsible for protecting the past, and I failed.”

  “It was in a locked case?” Mustafa asked.

  Kosay shook his head, and made a negative tick with his tongue. “From a case like the one over there.”

  He gestured toward a case with Plexiglas sides and a waist-high stand that held a single object lit from above.

  “It’s open on top,” Mustafa said.

  “You would have to be three meters tall to reach inside,” Kosay answered.

  “You have a guard?” Mustafa asked.

  Kosay indicated an empty chair near the door. “He’s from Kusadasi. Sometimes he’s late. But he’s honest.”

  “Of course he is,” Mustafa said. He walked around the case, eyed the perimeter of the room, tested the resilience of the floor. “No sensors?” he asked.

  Kosay shook his head.

  “It would take less than a minute to step onto the chair to reach an object in the case,” Mustafa said. “You have improved your security since? Put on an extra guard? You will install sensors?”

  Kosay looked sheepish. “Not enough money.”

  “Then what do you expect?” Mustafa asked.

  Kosay gave him an injured look and led them out of the room.

  They stopped for a moment in the garden and looked at sarcophagi and parapets, sundials and column fragments, and continued through a hall with findings from graves, with Mycenaean pottery and tomb stele, then into the hall of Artemis.

  Here he paused in front of a statue of the Great Artemis with a turreted crown, superhuman in form, adorned with fruits and animals and other symbols of fertility, arms outstretched for giving and receiving.

  The two statues of Artemis stood at opposite ends of the hall. The Great Artemis wore a crown with three tiers of city walls topped with the representation of a temple. Her legs were encased in a tight skirt decorated with lions, bulls, goats. Her outstretched arms were missing. And an array of bull’s testicles adorned her many-breasted chest.

  “Our Artemis is no ordinary Artemis, eternally hovering between girlhood and womanhood,” Kosay said. “Nor is she entirely the enthroned Kybele, mother of the gods and goddesses, of mountains, caverns, and beasts. She is like no other goddess. She is Mother Nature herself, the Great Virgin Mother of the Gods.”

  He pointed to her crown and the animals on her skirt. “Those are her attributes,” he said. “The lions and the crown on her head, the polis.”

  The Beautiful Artemis stood opposite, arms extended, her hairdo and her skirt decorated with animals, her chest covered with egg-like bull testes. Her polis was missing.

  They followed Kosay through the courtyard into another gallery and into a small, neat office at the far end. Blooming African daisies lined the window ledge. Kosay reached into a file cabinet and extracted a photograph that he placed on the desk.

  Tamar expected the Kybele to resemble the Ephesian Kybele, perhaps, in her guise as Artemis with her turreted crown; perhaps the Neolithic Kybele from Çatal Hüyük, looking like Queen Victoria enthroned on a birthing stool, a morbidly obese woman with dimpled knees and ham-like arms, 8,000 years old, and counting. But this one was different—a gold statuette of Kybele flanked by two lions, her skirt tight, her hands straight at her side.

  Kosay pointed to the polis headdress and the lions at her side. “These are also her attributes, the same as those of Artemis, the same as the Mother Goddess from Neolithic Çatal Hüyük. She, too, has lions on either side and the remnants of a polis on her head.

  “She is credited with giving birth to the land of Anatolia,” Kosay was saying. He ran his finger lovingly along the photograph of Kybele, pausing at the lions at her feet. “The religion of the Mother Goddess is the oldest religion in the world.”

  The words and music of a song began roiling through Tamar’s head while he spoke.

  Give me that old-time religion,

  Give me that old-time religion.

  It’s good enough for me.

  “Not all ancient religions believed in a Mother Goddess,” Mustafa said. “Fertility comes from the male.” He rumbled on. “Some people are the descendants of Adam alone. They know that life comes from Adam, the father of us all.”

  Orman gave him a disapproving look sharp enough to wither the virility of a bull.

  In the silence that followed, Tamar thought of Artemis with her bloody apron, of Mary in her house on the hill, of the grossly exaggerated genitals of Priapos in the museum halls, and the song kept buzzing through her head.

  It was good enough for mother,

  It was good enough for father,

  And it’s good enough for me.

  Chapter Seven

  Sofia, Bulgaria, August 7, 1990

  Chatham felt a twinge of apprehension at the sight of the man from the train. His bulk filled the doorway. His stance held an unspoken threat.

  How did he get to Sofia so quickly? Did he stay on the train?

  “Professor Chatham?” the man said in a low
, rumbling voice. He had bulging eyes and a jutting chin.

  “You’re Konstantinov?” The man nodded. “Irena’s brother?”

  He looked at the roses. “You come to see my sister?” He opened the door wider and stood back.

  Chatham stood awkwardly in the hall, his suitcase in his hand, the flowers held in front of him like a buffer. He blustered with courage he didn’t feel and tightened his grip on the bouquet of roses.

  “Where is Irena? She disappeared from the train.”

  The man stood aside. Behind him was a long whitewashed passageway trimmed with dark wood. A door opened at the far end. Irena drifted through and sailed toward Chatham, her arms spread out to greet him.

  For a moment, Chatham felt a tic of anxiety. Then, watching her glide down the hall with her sweet smile of welcome, he was reassured.

  He held out the bouquet.

  “Come in, come in,” Irena said. “My brother Dimitar and I expected you.”

  With a deft motion she maneuvered him into the apartment and closed the door behind him.

  He put down his bag and once more offered the flowers. “You knew I was coming?”

  “I saw a spider spin his web in the window. In Bulgaria, that’s always a sign of a visitor. And when I set the table, I laid out an extra place by mistake. That too is a sign.”

  “You got off the train. How did you get here before me?”

  “My brother met me with a car in Plovdiv. I didn’t tell you?” Her hand was on his arm now. “I’m glad you came. I wanted to see you again.”

  She reached for the flowers, brushed them lightly against her cheek, and buried her perfect nose next to a rose. He wanted to say, “You are so beautiful, even roses blush when they see you.” The words would have sounded insincere and sophomoric, so he said nothing. Instead, his face flushed with embarrassment.

  “An even number of flowers is for a funeral,” she said and pulled one rose out of the bouquet. She snapped the stem to shorten it, and moving closer, inserted the rose into the buttonhole of his lapel. “There now,” she said and patted his chest. “Of course you will stay for dinner?”

  Irena led him to a fairly large room at the end of the corridor furnished with a dingy rug, a table with four ladder-back chairs and a lumpy sofa that looked like it doubled as a bed.

  The table was set for three, Chatham noticed. She really did expect him.

  Irena told her brother she must go to the pazara, the market, to buy food for dinner, and Dimitar reached into his pocket and took out a few leva. Chatham recalled Irena’s conversation on the train, her resigned admission of their poverty. Her hospitality might cost them a meal later.

  “Allow me,” he said and held out twenty leva with a flourish, feeling gallant and generous.

  “Oh, no, not necessary,” Dimitar said as Irena reached for the twenty leva note and stashed it in her purse. She told Chatham to sit, to make himself at home, to speak with Dimitar, to get acquainted. Then she left.

  Chatham and Dimitar sat near the table in the ladder-back chairs, not quite facing each other. They looked at the table, at their fingers, out the window at the cloudless sky. Chatham felt the sharp edge from the corner of the chair press into his thigh, and moved his leg. He glanced at Dimitar, seeking some resemblance to Irena in Dimitar’s once-handsome face. A network of tiny broken veins gave his cheeks a pink tinge. Broken by time and slivovitz, Chatham thought.

  Dimitar reached into his pocket, took out a package of Rothmans, and offered one to Chatham. Chatham shook his head and waved the cigarette away with thanks. Dimitar stood up, brought an ashtray to the table, and sat down again.

  “Cigarettes are expensive in Bulgaria?” Chatham asked.

  “Everything is expensive.” He flourished the cigarette in the air between two fingers. “Other countries have a brain drain. In Bulgaria we have a money drain. A bank drain. All the money in Bulgaria is in the treasury of the Deutsche Bank.”

  He lit the cigarette, took a deep puff, laid it in the ashtray, and leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and began talking in a low voice. “Our peasants were wise, were small landowners. We were the breadbasket of Europe. This nation fed the Deutsche army during World War II. Then came the Communists. The Communist dictators owned the country and behaved as if they were always there, before the mountains, before the sun, before the earth was created. The first generation were idealists, the second generation went abroad and wanted to become rich. And they discovered how to do it. They discovered corruption.”

  He sat back in his chair, sighed, and nodded his head as if savoring the full extent of their duplicity.

  “And then came freedom. Communists disappeared. They turned into men who wanted to become rich. It was easy. They already knew corruption.”

  He shrugged, his hands held in front of him, palms up, while the cigarette smoke floated around him like a cloud.

  “It’s not a plot. There is no scenario. But what discipline they use. So smooth, the money disappears.”

  “Smuggled out of the country?” Chatham asked.

  “Smuggling? That’s the only way to make a living. But no one has reported even a single gram of drugs smuggled, not a single artifact.” His eyes followed the smoke from his cigarette, pluming upward and toward the window. “In Bulgaria we have two moralities, a small morality and a big morality.”

  “Dual standards?”

  “We don’t have dual standards. We don’t have any standards.”

  Dimitar fell silent, tipping the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray. He held the cigarette upright between his fingers and watched it burn. “We will come back from the ashes. Every house will be rebuilt stone by stone, man by man,” he said, and stopped talking.

  Chatham waited, his back straight against the chair, his hands in his lap.

  “Your sister is very beautiful,” he finally said into the silence.

  “I know. We are the descendents of Thracians. They say the Thracians were handsome people. And the Thracian hoard, the one you saw on the train. That is also handsome. Is that why you came?”

  Chatham didn’t know how to answer. Certainly he couldn’t say that he came to rescue Irena. Rescue her from what?

  “I am, after all, an archaeologist,” he said.

  “Archaeologists, ach. I know about archaeologists. We have a tradition here in Bulgaria. We know archaeologists are fools.”

  Chatham bristled. “You mean the search for the Golden Fleece? For Jason and the Argonauts?” And for a moment Chatham wondered if the beautiful Irena was a descendant of the terrible Medea.

  “No, no, worse than that,” Dimitar said. “The brothers Schorpil were the first Bulgarian archaeologists. They searched the shattered walls of time to find our past and rescue it from the abyss of oblivion. But after that—ach. You know the story of the Cyclops?”

  “From the Odyssey?”

  “No. The Bulgarian Cyclops. An archaeologist hired some gypsies to help dig a tomb. They dug so fast, so hard, that a pickaxe went through a skull. Most of the skull was rotted away.”

  “Could be the tomb was in a limestone area,” Chatham said. “Limestone leaches out the calcium from buried bone.”

  “Be that as it may, the pickaxe left a small hole in the middle of the forehead, and the archaeologist concluded that he had clear evidence of the existence of a Cyclops. He published a paper about it.”

  “Did anyone take it seriously?”

  “A few years later, someone sent him a large package. Inside the package was another, and inside that yet another. And another and another, until at last he found a small box, like the kind they use for a jewel. Inside that was a fish scale and a note that said, ‘Evidence of mermaids in the Black Sea.’”

  Dimitar paused. Chatham knew he was expected to laugh, so he did.

  Dimitar sighed and laid the cigarette in the ashtray, watching the smoke curl through the room as it burned down to ash.

  “I see y
ou like my sister. If you want to make a good impression on her, if you want to remain my friend, you will pay attention to the Thracian hoard.”

  So that was his game, Chatham thought. “You want me to buy it for the museum? I can’t. Only the board of directors of the museum can make that decision.”

  “No, no,” Dimitar said and moved uncomfortably in his chair.

  Both men sat upright in their chairs, arms folded, waiting for the other to speak. Occasionally Dimitar nodded to himself, as if agreeing with some thought. At last, they heard a key in the lock.

  “She’s back,” Dimitar said and went into the kitchen. Chatham listened to their muted voices punctuated by kitchen sounds—the clatter of plates, the scrape of drawers opening and closing. They emerged in a few minutes, balancing platters with bread, sliced cheese and sausage, tomatoes, roasted red peppers.

  “Come, eat,” Irena said and sat in the chair next to Chatham and put two pieces of bread on his plate. “Eat as you would at home.”

  “You are too hospitable,” Chatham said with a slight bow.

  Dimitar said, “Of course we are hospitable. We all say welcome, welcome with your money, dirty or not.”

  Irena gave her brother a sad smile. “Things could be worse.” She sat with her arm extended, as if she were looking for something. “Wine,” she said after a while. “I forgot the wine.”

  She pushed away from the table and went back to the kitchen. Chatham watched her, fascinated by the sensuous stride of her long legs, by the supple movement of her hips.

  “Maybe we get help from America,” Dimitar was saying. “Maybe NATO. I would like to see Bulgaria become a member of NATO.”

  Irena returned carrying a bottle of wine and three glasses. Chatham watched as her dress fell loosely from her shoulders when she bent over to pour the wine while Dimitar droned on.

  “NATO is corrupt too, of course, but the right kind of corruption. I would like to see a new people finally—finally—come to oppress the Bulgarians instead of the Russians and Germans.”